Time Travelers Never Die - Jack McDevitt [101]
He listened to the faint whir of an air vent. Why did his own house feel so strange? “You’re not here anywhere, are you, Dave?”
Nothing.
Good. He sat down at the computer and checked out the weekend race results.
CHAPTER 29
Being ignorant is not so much a shame, as being unwilling to learn.
—BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, POOR RICHARD’S ALMANACK
FOR Shel and Dave, life had become a lark. Though neither spoke the language, they navigated through a Russian week, visiting Moscow in 1913 to attend a concert performance of Sergei Rachmaninoff’s The Bells. The next evening, they traveled to St. Petersburg, December 23, 1888, to listen to Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade. They took two nights off so Dave could grade some papers, then returned to the Bolshoi, March 5, 1877, for Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake.
They sat down one evening at Lenny Pound’s and put together a to-do list: Dave thought they should find a way to spend an evening with Marcus Aurelius. Shel didn’t know who he was, but when Dave explained, he said okay.
Shel wanted to meet Michelangelo. “Preferably, we should catch him early, before he becomes famous. Maybe get to him at about the time he arrives in Rome.”
Check.
What else?
Dave inspected his beer. “I’d like to ride downriver on Mark Twain’s steamboat.”
“Okay,” said Shel. He was making notes. “I’d like to see the comet of 1811.”
“Big one, was it?”
“Enormous. Double tail.”
“Put it down.”
“I’ll tell you what else I’d like to do.”
“What’s that, Shel?”
“Socrates. I’d like to be there for the last dialogue.”
“You mean when he drank the hemlock?”
“Yes.”
“I thought we wanted to avoid killings and stuff.”
“This is different. He talked about life and death during those last hours. It would be painful, and my Greek is still not that good, but—”
“Okay.”
Shel made the entry and looked up. “What else?”
Dave took a healthy swig of his beer. “Ride with Kit Carson.”
“You? I’ve seen you on a horse.”
“I’ll learn.”
“Okay.” He wrote it down.
Shel thought he’d enjoy spending an evening with Charles Darwin.
Dave wanted to meet Lord Byron.
“Speaking of meeting people,” said Shel, “I’ll tell you the guy I’d particularly like to meet.”
“Who’s that?”
“Leonidas. I’d like to run into him on the way to Thermopylae.”
And so it went. They recorded ideas and wrote down names, and eventually they got to Ben Franklin.
Dave pushed his empty glass aside. “Yes,” he said. “I’d enjoy that. But how do we get in to see him?”
“Shouldn’t be hard. How’d we get to see Tom Paine? Make something up.”
THE first step was to travel to London in October 1726 to pick up a copy of Gulliver’s Travels, then just published. They stopped at Carleton’s Book Store, off Regent’s Park. The salesclerk, who was also apparently the owner, told them they’d been lucky, that he couldn’t keep the book in stock. “Only got one left,” he said. “I’ll confess, I don’t understand the thing myself. But it’s getting a lot of attention.” He was about sixty, congenial, with enormous eyebrows.
Except it wasn’t there, on the center shelf of the fiction section, where he’d expected. He had to change glasses to go looking for it. Shel helped out, and they hunted through the romance shelves. “I was sure,” the clerk said, “I put it here.”
It was prominently displayed, in two volumes, in the front of the store. He changed glasses, took them down from the shelf, and handed them to Shel.
“Needs bifocals,” said Dave.
“Pardon?” asked the clerk.
“Nothing important,” said Dave.
Franklin, of course, was only at the beginning of his career. But help was on the way.
The volumes were bound in velvet. The book had been published anonymously.
“What don’t you understand about it?” Dave asked the dealer.
“What all the fuss is about. It’s got tiny people. Giants. Horses that talk. It’s a book for children.” He went back to his original spectacles. “No wonder the author’s keeping his name quiet. I would, too.”
IN 1727, Franklin had founded the Junto,